beauty

It’s been six months since I started doing these Daily Dozen sets consistently. Sure, I’ve missed a day or two here or there but for the most part, every day between Monday and Friday has seen some new categorization of people. One thing I’ve learned is that what seemed specific in the past can become really general in retrospect. The set of women with short hair is a good example. It seemed pretty focused at the time but what counts as short? Why not look at different color hair in different styles? What about time of day? Time of year? Etc.

Live and learn I suppose.

Today’s set features 12 women with short dark hair. I haven’t looked at the month or time these photos were taken but I have limited them to Cambridge. It’s pretty narrow, which gives me much more flexibility over time. I hope you’ll enjoy the set.

I was kind of surprised to see I hadn’t already done a set of women in red but it doesn’t seem like I have. It gets tough over time to remember all of the Daily Dozen sets. Pintrist has been really helpful. I can see all of the sets and figure out which ones I either haven’t done or haven’t done in a while. At some point I know I will repeat themes but I’m trying to make sure I don’t reuse the same photos too often. It gets tricky. I do have an evolving system that’s working pretty well. Going back and doing it retroactively is pretty time-consuming though. Such is life.

There’s something very cool about a picture that captures dynamic motion. (I suppose all motion is dynamic, but what I mean is that shows it in a way that’s easy to appreciate. Hair is an obvious place to look for motion and I was thinking about it this morning and wondering how many shots I have of women whose hair is moving in some way. It turns out there were quite a few. There were several of dancers for Beats Antique, a few of people running, some of people in the wind and a couple of people singing. I’m not going to say that the motion in every one of these cases is dramatic but it’s there if you look.

This weekend I took a photo of a woman who looked great. Absolutely glamourous. It made me want to do a set around glamour but it was tough. I don’t have that many photographs of glamourous women and I don’t *really* know how glamour is defined. After looking for a while I did find 12 photos that fit the bill. What does glamour mean to you?

This set is going to be a little subjective. I suppose all of them are in a way but this one more than most. That’s because the sparkle in someone’s eye is really easy to see in life but harder in a photograph. I’ve chosen many of today’s faces based on memory rather than looking at the image itself. That’s absolutely fine with me though; and since this is my project that makes it A-OK. I hope you’ll enjoy the pictures and can see the sparkles. All of them are from 1000faces 3. (Speaking of which, I am only 15 photographs away from 3000 and starting the next set!)

Today’s set was going to be 12 men wearing necklaces to compliment last week’s set of women wearing the same. Unfortunately, after looking at a few thousand images I only found eight. That stinks. It meant I had to fall back to something safer and easier given my time constraints. What I ended up with is a set of 12 women taken from the right. To make it slightly more challenging for myself (and to allow me to do the set again in the future) I limited myself to 1000faces 3. There were way more than enough.

Sometimes when I’m photographing people they ask me to take their “good side” but I never understand. I mean unless there’s some weird growth or deformity on one side of a person’s face they’re both “good sides” to me. In some of these cases I was forced to shoot from the right, in others the women might naturally turn to the right and in a few (and I couldn’t say which) I was asked to take it from the right.

Regardless of which side they’re taken from, I think people’s faces are fantastic and hope you do too.